Early simulations The history of fantasy games can be traced to the 19th century. The
tabletop game Sebring Parlor Base Ball, introduced in 1866, allowed participants to
simulate games by propelling a coin into slots on a wooden board. Later games featured outcomes determined by dice rolls or spinners. Individual player cards and dice roll simulations were also emulated in the
Strat-O-Matic game, which was first released in 1961.
Daniel Okrent, who would later be credited with developing modern
fantasy baseball, was an avid Strat-O-Matic player, telling
Sports Illustrated in 2011 that "if there hadn't been Strat-O-Matic, I still think I would have come up with
rotisserie, but unquestionably it helped." While some of these fantasy games produced outcomes based on the performances of real athletes, they were not designed to be played out over the course of a season, nor did they take current statistics into account, relying instead on those from previous years.
The first leagues In the 1950s,
Oakland, California businessman and future limited partner in the
Oakland Raiders Wilfred "Bill" Winkenbach developed a fantasy golf game in which participants would select a roster of professional golfers and compare their scores at the end of a given tournament, with the lowest combined total of strokes winning. He also created a baseball game in which players drafted hitters and pitchers, comparing their real-life statistics against each other. Gamson would go on to play the game as a professor at the University of Michigan, where another competitor was Bob Sklar. One of Sklar's students was Daniel Okrent. According to
Alan Schwarz's
The Numbers Game: Baseball’s Lifelong Fascination with Statistics, Sklar told Okrent about the Baseball Seminar league. The inaugural league was called the Greater Oakland Professional Pigskin Prognosticators League (GOPPPL), and the first draft took place at Winkenbach's home in Oakland in August 1963. One of the league's original members, Andy Mousalimas, owned a sports bar in Oakland called the King's X, where the first public fantasy football league was founded in 1969.
Rotisserie League Baseball Modern fantasy baseball was developed and popularized in the 1980s by a group of journalists who created Rotisserie League Baseball in 1980. The league was named after the New York City restaurant La Rotisserie Française, where its founders met for lunch and first played the game. Magazine writer-editor
Daniel Okrent is credited with introducing the rotisserie league concept to the group and inventing the scoring system. Players in the Rotisserie League drafted teams of active MLB players and tracked their statistics during the season to compile their scores. proved to be popular despite the difficulties of compiling statistics by hand, which was an early drawback to participation. Okrent credits the idea's rapid spread to the fact that the initial league was created by sports journalists, telling
Vanity Fair in 2008 that "most of us in the league were in the media, and we got a lot of press coverage that first season. The second season, there were rotisserie leagues in every Major League
press box." In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the company Phoneworks created nationwide fantasy games for a variety of sports, launching them in a variety of newspapers across the United States. Players chose their teams by calling a toll-free phone number and entering four-digit codes for each of their player selections. The games served as an early version of today's daily fantasy sports by rewarding each week's highest-scoring participants with prizes. In 1993, the magazine
Fantasy Football Weekly was launched. Also that year,
USA Today added a weekly fantasy baseball columnist, John Hunt. Hunt started a league among sports personalities called the
League of Alternate Baseball Reality, which first included
Peter Gammons,
Keith Olbermann and
Bill James, among others.
Internet expansion The growth of the Internet during the 1990s brought a "broad demographic shift in fantasy sports participation" because it enabled fantasy sports participants to instantaneously download tabulated statistics, rather than having to search for
box scores of individual games in newspapers and keep track of cumulative statistics on paper. In 1995,
ESPN launched its first entirely Internet-based fantasy baseball game, with other major sports and entertainment companies following suit in the ensuing years. The site focused on music, entertainment and hockey in general in addition to fantasy competitions. the same year that the fantasy news website now known as
RotoWire was launched. In July 1999,
Yahoo began offering its fantasy football product for free, a decision that gave the site an advantage over its competitors. CBS, which had transitioned to a free model for its league commissioner services, switched back to a paid model before the 2002 MLB season. A trade group for the industry, the
Fantasy Sports Trade Association, was formed in 1998. Now known as the Fantasy Sports & Gaming Association (FSGA), the organization estimates that in 2003, there were 15.2 million fantasy sports players in the United States and Canada. During the first decade of the 2000s, fantasy sports started to become a mainstream hobby. In 2002, the
National Football League (NFL) found that while the average male surveyed on its website spent 6.6 hours a week watching the league on television, fantasy players surveyed said they watched 8.4 hours of NFL football per week. "This is the first time we've been able to demonstrate specifically that fantasy play drives TV viewing," said Chris Russo, the NFL's senior vice president at the time. As a result of the survey's findings, the league made fantasy offerings more prominent on its website and produced television ads for fantasy football featuring active players. However, leagues began to embrace fantasy sports as their value towards increasing fans' consumption of sports became more evident. In June 2007, Fantasy Sports Live, one of the first daily fantasy sites, was launched. In November 2008,
NBC launched a daily fantasy site called SnapDraft, and
FanDuel was founded in 2009 as a spin-off of a Scottish
prediction market company.
DraftKings was founded in 2012. Following venture capital investments from various firms, including from professional sports leagues such as MLB and the
National Basketball Association (NBA), In April 2015, after the NFL began to allow daily fantasy providers to sign multi-year team sponsorship deals, FanDuel reached deals with sixteen teams for placements on team-oriented digital properties, radio broadcasts, and within their stadiums. DraftKings has also received investments from
Jerry Jones and
Robert Kraft, who own the
Dallas Cowboys and
New England Patriots, respectively. The legality of daily fantasy sports has been questioned, with critics arguing that it more closely resembles
proposition wagering on athlete performance than a traditional fantasy sports game. However, following the 2018
United States Supreme Court decision in
Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, which allowed states to legalize sports betting, questions surrounding the legality of daily fantasy sports, as well as fantasy sports in general, within the United States have largely been settled.
Montana is the only US state to officially ban online fantasy sports. ==Industry overview==